The screen-producing wing of LG, LG Display during a Tuesday press event held in Korea, unveiled an impossibly thin TV made using the OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) technology.
The 55-inch OLED displayed weighed just 1.9 Kilograms and less than one millimeter thick.
It was mounted on a wall, thanks to a magnetic mat fixed on the wall. It was possible to remove the display from the wall by simply peeling it off as you would peel off a wallpaper from a wall.
The unveiling of the Wallpaper TV is part of LG commitment to championed further research and development into the OLED technology. LG hopes to bring out a more affordable and practical products to the consumer market.
Head of LG Display’s OLED business unit, Sang-Deog Yeo, in a press statement, said: “OLED represents a groundbreaking technology” that is not only important to the company, but also the industry in general.
The OLED technology is believed to be the next step in the evolutionary ladder, given the HD craze which began some years ago sparked by plasma, the LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) and now currently being dominated by LED (Light Emitting Diode) technology. Industry experts almost unanimously agree that OLED is the next frontier.
What makes OLED technology superiors to the previous inventions is that it add an organic compound layer that into the manufacturing process, thereby enabling the production of impossibly thin displays that can also be curved. The organic materials used within also emits light, thus eliminating the need for using backlights. All these factors considered. OLED is the desirable choice of technology for making displays for television sets, wearable technologies, and mobile devices.
Other tech companies such as Sony and Samsung have previously also used OLED technology to manufacture displays, but the cost of the production proved to be quite high. Mainly because OLED displays production have historically produced low yield, in other most units in production line don’t reach the finish line in good working conditions as expected. This means that the companies incur a lot of wastes, and high costs in producing these displays and in turn the cost will be passed on to the end consumers. Take, for instance, the LG 65-inch 4K OLED TV that goes for about $9,000.
At the Tuesday event, when LG unveiled the Wallpaper TV, the LG Display wing said it is targeting to sell 600,000 OLED TV by the end of this year and 1.5 million in 2016. The company, however, admitted that OLED displays will not be ubiquitous for perhaps the next five to 10 years due to the high cost of production involved.
